On a cold November night in 1992, Dale Hoffman, a hardworking truck driver, pulled his eighteen-wheeler into a Texaco station off Route 287. His Peterbilt, heavy with machine parts bound for Dallas, idled like a restless beast under the fluorescent lights while Dale, a husband, father of one, and co-owner of Twin Pines Trucking, stepped into the convenience store.
He ordered what he always did, a sandwich and a coffee, but the receipt told a different story—it listed two sandwiches and two coffees. At 11:47 p.m., Dale climbed back into his cab and pulled out of the lot, never to be seen again. No accident was reported, no wreckage discovered, and no body surfaced. For his wife Linda and their eight-year-old daughter Emma, there were only painful questions and cruel rumors suggesting Dale had simply walked away. After months of searching, the insurance company declared him missing and presumed dead, issuing a $700,000 payout. Whispers circulated that he had run off with another woman or fled to Mexico, and Emma grew up believing the worst—that her father had abandoned her. It took two decades, a drained quarry, and a crumpled receipt to reveal the truth.
In October 2012, when construction crews began draining Garrison Quarry for redevelopment, they stumbled on a grim discovery. Thirty feet down, buried beneath silt and stagnant water, was Dale’s 1987 Peterbilt, surprisingly intact. Inside, strapped to the driver’s seat, was Dale himself, preserved by the airless environment. His mustache, the scar on his chin, even the photo of Emma taped to the dashboard remained visible, like a time capsule that had waited twenty years to speak. At first glance, his death might have looked like an accident, but the medical examiner, upon closer inspection, found a small-caliber bullet wound at the base of his skull. Dale hadn’t disappeared—he had been murdered. And the clue that would crack open the case wasn’t the bullet, but the Texaco receipt in his pocket. Two sandwiches. Two coffees.
For a man who never ordered more than one of anything. Sheriff Tom Garrett made the call to Emma, now twenty-eight. At first she almost ignored the unknown number while working at the hardware store, but when she answered, his words stopped her cold: “We found your father.” At the morgue, Emma and Linda, remarried and hardened by years of disappointment, stood over Dale’s preserved body. Recognition was instant and devastating. For twenty years, they had lived under the shadow of abandonment, but now the sheriff told them the truth—“Your father didn’t leave. He was murdered.” Investigators quickly focused on one man: Carl Briggs, Dale’s longtime business partner and family friend. Carl had been there after Dale’s disappearance, helping Linda with insurance paperwork, giving Emma gifts, and eventually selling the trucking business before retiring comfortably.
He had even stood at Emma’s wedding, telling her how proud her father would have been. But a second receipt found inside the truck painted a darker picture. Purchased with Carl’s credit card at 10:15 p.m. the night Dale vanished, it listed a sandwich and a coffee. His alibi of being home sick, confirmed by his wife Dolores, no longer held. He had been with Dale that night. Further evidence surfaced from Dale’s logbooks, recovered from his brother Wayne, where Dale had written troubling notes: Carl asking about life insurance, Carl gambling again, Dolores calling in worry. Carl’s debts were no secret, and rumors swirled of thousands lost at truck stop casinos. By November 1992, Carl needed cash badly, and Dale’s life insurance combined with control of the business provided the perfect solution. For Emma, the betrayal was unbearable.
It wasn’t only that her father hadn’t abandoned her, but that the man who stepped into their lives as a helper may have been the very person who killed him. The money that had supported her college education felt tainted—“blood money,” she called it. Her mother recalled Carl insisting Dale had been depressed and encouraging her to file the claim, details that now seemed orchestrated. Investigators examined the truck like a crime scene frozen in time. Algae clung to the chrome, the bumper still bore a dent from when young Emma had hit it with her bike, and on the dashboard was her third-grade photo. Missing, however, was Dale’s logbook—something no trucker would part with willingly, suggesting it had been deliberately removed.
The quarry had kept its silence for two decades, but draining it revealed Carl’s motive, opportunity, and presence with Dale that night. Sheriff Garrett reopened the case, confronting Carl, who denied involvement, dismissing the receipts as coincidences. But coincidences do not buy two sandwiches and two coffees. Dolores clung to her claim that Carl was home, but the credit card trail said otherwise. For Emma, justice became about more than punishment; it was about restoring her father’s name. For years she had lived with shame, telling people her father left her, when in reality he had been a victim. Every forgotten receipt, every overlooked clue, became part of rewriting his story.
True crime often turns on the smallest details, and in Dale Hoffman’s case it was a single slip of paper that outlasted time, water, and silence. That receipt proved he wasn’t alone that night and exposed the betrayal behind his murder. For Emma, the discovery didn’t erase the years of pain, but it gave her father back—not as a deserter, but as a man who loved his family until the end, whose story, at last, was finally told.
